About the 13 March 2024 Talk update 6March2024  

About the Speaker

Anthony Inglis Howard-Williams is a musician and conductor of orchestras.  He is currently the Music Director for Katherine Jenkins and the London Concert Orchestra.  For 33 years he was the Music Supervisor of Phantom of The Opera at His Majesty's Theatre.  

More often than any other artist Anthony has appeared in London's Royal Albert Hall and he has conducted extensively around the world with major orchestras.  His autobiography "Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms!" was so titled after a comment made to him by a member of the audience.  It is available now.

About the Talk

Aside from conducting around the world, Anthony has an extraordinary and unique story to tell: his family has supplied 9 distinguished pilots to the Royal Air Force. We will travel from the Royal Flying Corps in the 1st world war over the Somme and Passchendaele, via "One of The Few", to a current Chinook pilot. Others were, firstly, the Senior Air Officer Commanding (the SAOC) of the British Expeditionary Force, Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard who came up with the idea of The Little Ships at Dunkirk, secondly, Air Commodore Ernest Howard-Williams and number 2 to Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding and thirdly, Flight Lieutenant Cecil Turner, Anthony's great-grandfather.  At the age of 66 Cecil was too old for active service in WW2 but was appointed his commission so that he could fly his Autogyro the results from which would be used to calibrate new Radar sets.

Anthony's father-in-law was a senior loftsman at Hawkers, and Anthony and his wife, Jan Howard-Williams, live half a mile from the Hawker Centre.